WINN_106_KW_.jpg Kary Schulman (Second from right) poses with most of her staff from the past 25-years (L to R) R. Bobby Ducharme, Khan Wong, Kim Fowler, Valerie Tookes, Sharon Combs, Kary Schulman and Ren� Hayes on Monday September 18, 2006 during the anniversary celebration held in honor of Schulman's 25 years as the head of Grants for the Arts held at the ODC in San Francisco . Kat Wade/The Chronicle ** R. Bobby Ducharme, Khan Wong, Kim Fowler, Valerie Tookes, Sharon Combs, Kary Schulman and Ren� Hayes (subjects) cq Mandatory Credit for San Francisco Chronicle and photographer, Kat Wade, Mags out

Photo: Kat Wade

WINN_106_KW_.jpg Kary Schulman (Second from right) poses with most...

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WINN_039_KW_.jpg On Monday September 18, 2006 at the anniversary celebration for Kary Schulman who has been the head oft Grants for the Arts for 25 years held at the ODC in San Francisco . Kat Wade/The Chronicle ** cq Mandatory Credit for San Francisco Chronicle and photographer, Kat Wade, Mags out

It's a phrase that makes people feel at once inspired, united and a little queasy -- "the arts community." In its best, Platonic sense, the term bonds artists, administrators, funders, audiences, even critics in a mutual quest for great and risk-taking art, reasonably full houses and enough money to make it all happen another day and thrive.

The reality, as realities tend to be, isn't always so lovely. Day to day, month to month, year after year, a life in the arts can be more soul-sapping toil than ramble through the Elysian fields. Organizations are forever regrouping and retrenching in a convulsive economy. A foundation abruptly decides to fund school lunches instead of muralists or modern dance. Artists second-guess and censor themselves, fretting that their work might not be good enough, that someone else got a bigger grant or a glossier review.

Every city has its heroes, both the prominent and unsung, whose particular skills, personality and convictions ensure that the arts truly do find the community they need instead of the corrosion that undermines them. Various local names come readily to mind -- San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, philanthropists Warren Hellman and Dede Wilsey, the San Francisco Foundation's articulate arts advocate John Killacky.

And then there's Kary Schulman. For the past quarter century, no other person has meant more to the vitality of the arts in San Francisco, to the amplitude and richness of culture itself here, than this longtime and fondly cherished director of the city's Grants for the Arts program. In a feat of sustained and museum-quality finesse, Schulman has turned City Hall bureaucracy into her own kind of art form.

By overseeing, fostering and doggedly protecting one of the most visionary and admired public arts funding programs in the country, Schulman has guaranteed that hundreds of organizations large and small receive the kind of steady support for ongoing operating expenses, as opposed to new buildings or one-time special projects, that's as essential as oxygen and increasingly rare. The money -- about $10 million last year -- is drawn from city hotel tax revenues. Grants for the Arts supports everything from the San Francisco Opera and the Exploratorium to El Teatro Esperanza and the Queer Cultural Center.

This city undoubtedly would be a drier, duller, more homogenous place without Schulman's unwavering commitment to arts across the spectrum. She is, on her own self-effacing terms, a shaping force on a par with Henry Geldzahler, the charismatic cultural affairs commissioner of New York in the late 1970s and early '80s; Roger L. Stevens, the patrician first chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s; or the civic-minded donors who underwrote the American Conservatory Theater's early seasons in San Francisco 40 years ago.

"She's the lodestar," says Pamela H. David, executive director of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. "Kary does what she does better than anyone else." Artist Rhodessa Jones called Schulman "the goddess queen at the helm" at a 25th anniversary celebration-cum-60th birthday party for Schulman held Monday at ODC's new Mission District classroom and dance studio complex. "She's our John Muir," said choreographer Alonzo King. "She listens," said Roger Boas, the former city administrator who hired her in 1981. "Her ego is under total control. And her judgment is impeccable."

It's that air of attentive, egoless mastery that may be Schulman's defining trait. Operating in one of the most hotly politicized cities in the country, where everything from street signs to arts funding can be snarled in factionalism, Schulman maintains an unflappable cool.

Last year, in yet another challenge to the sanctity of Grants for the Arts (there have been many), Schulman successfully opposed Mayor Gavin Newsom's proposal to merge her agency with the very differently purposed city Arts Commission -- and did it without ever seeming to get out of her chair. On Monday, Newsom issued a proclamation in her honor. Schulman may be, in her Zenlike avoidance of ever seeming political, one of the city's most skillful politicians.

Her influence is by no means limited to the funds that flow through her paper-crammed office on the third floor of City Hall. By leveraging influence with other funders, fellow arts groups and other names in her ample Rolodex, Schulman has stage-managed multiple success stories. If it weren't for Schulman, the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre's executive director Quentin Easter said the other day, his company might well have folded in the late 1980s. ODC's Brenda Way recalled how important it was when her young dance troupe received its first Grants for the Arts funding 25 years ago. "It was a vote of confidence. We'd never heard of regular funding. It made us feel like anything can happen." ODC's annual budget was about $70,000 when the company received its first city grant. Now it's $3.5 million.

Born and raised in New Cumberland, Pa., Schulman comes by her ground-level practicality naturally. Her father was a heavy-equipment operator. Her mother worked in a box factory. Swept into the late '60s counter culture, Schulman made her way from New York University to Antioch College, where she worked in the school's theater department, joined the Mother Jones Memorial Radio Collective and organized rallies. It was all training for her future life. One important lesson, she said over lunch the other day, was this: "If you put the word 'refreshments' on the flyer, more people are likely to show up."

"She's always had that value of simplicity," says her old friend Kim Aubry, a documentary film maker who heads ZAP Zoetrope Aubry Productions. "It comes from the Pennsylvania Dutch background."

Schulman, a mother of four adult children, came to California with her professor husband in 1979 (they are now divorced). Almost immediately, she said, the weather, the Mediterranean light and the pastel house colors won her over. "I felt like time had been put on my life, just because of the weather." Schulman has lived in the same house in Berkeley ever since. After administrative posts at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and Make-A-Circus, she joined the two-person Hotel Tax Fund staff and was appointed director in 1981. In her first year on the job, the fund distributed $1.5 million to arts groups.

Schulman, who wears her long, strawberry blond hair in a chignon and peers sagaciously through half-glasses, jokes about being an "old growth redwood." Aubry remembers a couple of dark chapters over the years, when Shulman was "depressed and frustrated with the politics of the job." But after 25 years she remains zesty and engaged. "I'm such a Pollyanna," she said. "I suppose at some level I couldn't believe something this good and stable could go away."

Schulman may be disposed to see the best in people and their efforts, but she's anything but a sap. Her daughter, California Shakespeare Theater actress Susannah Schulman, remembers her mother attending childhood plays in the backyard. "The second one of us flubbed a line, she'd stand up and say, 'OK, kids. Call me back when you've rehearsed more.' "

Kary Schulman has brought the same kind of professional standards to the groups she evaluates in Davies Hall, dance lofts and rickety theaters. "She understands the importance of it all to the city's lifeblood," says James Kass, founder and executive director of Youth Speaks. "I can't tell you how much it means for the kids in our program to be funded alongside the Poetry Center. It puts us in literary tradition and continuum."

On Monday night, after some teary speeches and performances by the Kronos Quartet, a Warren Hellman-led bluegrass band and others, Schulman stood up before her appreciative constituents with, fittingly, a file folder in her hand. She wasn't going anywhere, she said. But she knew that younger and smarter directors would succeed her someday. "But there will never be one who loves you more," she concluded.

The feeling, in a room reverberating with applause and cheers and a little sobbing, was entirely mutual.